To Have And To Let Go
by Athena Alexandria
Summary: A Kate/Kevin fic that bridges the gap between the flashbacks in I Do and Kate's decision to run away to Australia. Now a one shot.


Hi and welcome to another biproduct of my bizarre Kevin / Nathan Fillion obsession, based on an idea I had for a follow up to I Do. I've been mulling it over for a while, and then today (when I was supposed to be researching my thesis, no less!) I got inspired to start it, instead of my usual update (review count is extremely low again, so if you wanna do your part, please let me know what you thought of the last chapter, even if you hated it, which I suspect a lot of you did!). It's a two shot, with the first part from Kevin's perspective, and the second from Kate's -- if you can't get into it, just pretend Kevin is Jack! I was sort of channelling him when I wrote it anyway! ;)

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TO HAVE AND TO LET GO

Part One: Kevin

"_What if I told you I was a fugitive?"_

The words lingered in Kevin's mind like a half-forgotten nightmare when he woke up, shattering the stillness of the house.

"_What if I told you I was on the run for blowing up my father, and it was only a matter of time before you found out?"_

He could remember her saying it, and he knew that he hadn't imagined it, but it was a joke, it had to be. The Monica he knew; and loved; wasn't a murderer… but then, if what she'd told him was as true as she claimed, then he didn't know her at all.

"_My name's not Monica."_

He didn't even know her name.

At first.

After she disappeared, he didn't sleep for a week, putting in double shifts at the station so that he could scour the databases for a name, a record, a reference, anything that would tell him who she was; who he'd married.

He couldn't believe that he'd allowed himself to be sucked in by her; that he'd fallen for a woman who didn't exist. It didn't feel real, like something in the kind of movie that he would have taken her to see on a date, not the single most painful event in his life.

Then, he found her.

It was surprisingly easy: as far as crimes went, hers was unique, leaving a kind of signature that made it easy to trace.

Katherine "Kate" Austen, he discovered her true name was, though to him, she didn't look or act like a "Kate"; born in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, to Samuel and Diane Austen, according to her birth certificate. She was 26 years old: younger than he would have guessed.

When he met her, "Monica" swore that she was 29. It made him feel like an idiot in hindsight, teasing her about turning the big 3-0; downright moronic for taking her to most expensive restaurant he could afford to make her feel better about it. It wasn't even her birthday.

Even that had been a lie.

In fact, ironically, the only honest words she'd even spoken to him were the only ones he hadn't believed: She'd been arrested in 2001 for the murder of her stepfather, Wayne Jansen, but never formally charged, after escaping police custody before the arraignment.

No one had seen her since.

If only that were true.

When he confided all this in his partner, he thought that he was having a stress-induced breakdown. Told him to take those tickets and go to Costa Rica for a vacation, to clear his head.

He went to Iowa instead, to Des Moines, to see the only other person who claimed to have had contact with her since she went on the run.

Edward Mars.

If his stories were to be believed, he was on a first name basis with her: in fact, he claimed to have received several phone calls from her over the past few months, which, while recorded, were never successfully traced.

If they had been, Kevin wondered if he would have found that they'd come from his own house; if they had, he realised, _feeling_ stupid would have been the least of his concerns. It would have been better to lose his job and go to prison than admit that he'd been oblivious to the fact that he was sharing his bed with a fugitive.

An arrogant man in his forties, the marshal had taken one look at him and laughed. "You're the guy -- the one she nearly gave it all up for," he said in a tone that was part realisation, part wonderment, all smug, tucking his hands behind his head, his feet on the desk. "I woulda guessed a farmer, or some Joe Lunchbox type, but a cop? The girl's got game."

It stung, having someone make light of his pain, his _stupidity_, but Kevin resisted the urge to pin him against the wall as he asked the question he'd come for: "Where is she? You say you set a trap for her – where?"

It was only after he failed to get an adequate answer that he gave in to the impulse.

"Santa Fe, New Mexico… a bank," the marshal choked out, no longer looking as self-satisfied as Kevin tightened his grip on his collar, but he couldn't seem to resist getting another jibe in as he added, "You want me to write down the address? You can give it to your girlfriend next time you see her – how long's it been now?"

The man was an ass; after releasing him with a solid shove, his head cracking audibly against the drywall, Kevin walked out of the US Marshals Service offices hoping that something nasty would befall him before long, something that would teach him a lesson about getting off on other people's misfortune.

For what remained of his vacation time, and into his sick leave, he staked out each of the banks in and around Santa Fe, starting with the Los Alamos National Bank, and ending with the New Mexico Bank and Trust, but if she'd deciphered the marshal's clues, she didn't take the bait.

In fact, it wasn't until he was back at work in Miami that he heard reports that the latter had been held up, and wondered if it could have been her. If it was, she was good: two known offenders were apprehended for the crime, but there was no word of a female accomplice. Both men had been shot, presumably by the manager, who had been coerced into taking them into the vault to open a safety deposit box, but no one else was hurt.

That was the last he heard of her in a year.

After accepting that she wasn't coming back, though she insisted that she would never understand why, his mother tried to set him up on dates with friends' daughters and women from her sewing club, to get him out of the station, but he couldn't help it: she was fast becoming an obsession. He needed to talk to her, to hear from her own lips that she'd lied about loving him too, and then he could accept his own loss and move on. He needed to hear that her vows were just words, that when she'd said she wanted to be with him for better or for worse, she was only thinking of him as a safe place to hide.

Then came the day that an colleague who'd moved to Oregon since the wedding called him on his cell to tell him that his wife had seen her walking down the streets of Portland. She wasn't sure it was her; her hair was different now, she said, longer and curlier; so she hadn't stopped to say hello, but she wanted to know if they would come for dinner, if they were in town.

After actively searching for her for so long, it came as a shock to him to hear that he might have found her without trying, but not so much of one that he forgot to press his friend for details before hanging up.

By the time he got off the phone, he was pretty sure that he, too, thought he was losing his mind, but he couldn't find it in himself to care about anything but her.

She was in Portland: he was willing to lay money on it.

Booking a last minute flight, he was halfway to Oregon before he realised that he'd forgotten to call the station and tell them that he was taking a personal day, but he pushed the thought from his mind, filing it away as unimportant as he ran through the speech he'd spent the last twelve months preparing. Given how good she was at hiding, even from him; _especially_ from him; he knew that if his friend was right, and it was really her that his wife had seen, he wouldn't get another at confronting her before she dropped off the face of the earth forever.


End file.
